How could she answer? How tell him that the world is often too fierce for its poor creatures, overstrains and soils them in their most secret nerves; and that with all their horrors they would not have it otherwise. He had come like the unspoiled essence of living, groping blindly for what it divines to be happy and real and true; he was thwarted and damned by the murderous pettiness of his own scarred brethren. If I had two friends called Food and Hunger, I’d never introduce them to each other. Must she, who was born to love him, be the one to tell him this?
“You must go. Don’t you see, it isn’t only us. It’s you too. You and George.... Oh, I tried not to tell you. George is just you grown up.”
He looked at her, appalled.
“You’re the George that was once. That’s why he hates you so.—You’re George the Fifth, I suppose,” she said, forgetting he wouldn’t understand.
“I won’t be like George!” he exclaimed. “But I shan’t go unless you’ll come with me. It wouldn’t be any fun unless you were there. Help us to get away, and we’ll never come again.”
She did not tell him that she could never go back; that he must go alone; that they would always be lonely.
“Are you sure?” he asked pitiably. “Have I got to be like that? Like George, I mean?”
“Hurry, hurry,” was all she could say.
He was running toward the house.